On Tuesday the 2nd of June, Justice Murray Sinclair, Manitoba's first aboriginal justice, finalized the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission was established in 2007 as a part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement ( that agreement also paid out a settlement to each person who could prove, through their stories, that they had been interred in a Residential School). The other Commissioners were Marie Wilson, ( journalist, university lecturer, and former senior manager at several crown corporations) and Chief Wilton Littlechild ( a lawyer and former Progressive Conservative MP).
The Commission's mandate was to seek out the survivors of the residential schools that had housed First Nation children. The group took testimony from over 6000 survivors, many were video taped, and those videos will be archived in order to educate Canadians about the history of residential schools.
Residential schools ran for 150 years: from the 1840's to 1990's. And they had one purpose...to "get the Indian out of the child".
Follow me over the fold for more.
Residential schools began as a part of Sir John A Macdonald's way of dealing with the "Indian problem" a hundred and fifty years ago. The schools were build and run by churches, primarily Catholic and paid for by the government. A means to assimilate the First Nations children into Canadian culture.
The schools were not, by any means, the only way the government of the time in the 1840's tried to solve their perceived problem with the Indian. They created reservations and moved all the Indians onto them. Indians were not allowed to leave their allotted reservations, nor were they allowed to vote. They also weren't given the tools to grow their own food, nor the means to buy some. What ensued during the years was starvation and disease running rampant amongst the population.
But as bad as those atrocities were, the worst, by far was the residential schools. The government determined that in order to get the children assimilated, they would have to educate them to be like white children. They first built several of the schools all over the country, staffed them with Catholic and Anglican priests, and then began to take the children. The cattle trucks, showed up on the reservations and the children were rounded up and loaded onto the trucks. Parents who fought or objected were told they'd be arrested. They wept and watched as their children were forcibly taken to a place unknown. There was nothing they could do.
The children were then taken to trains and shoved onto them with no food or water or clothing. Many cried the whole journey.
Larry Beardy described his first train trip that took him Churchill, Man. to the Anglican school in Dauphin, Man 1,200 km away.
“There was a lot of crying on that train. At every stop … children will get on the train, and then there’d be more crying, and everybody started crying, all the way to Dauphin, and that’s how it was,” said Beardy. “That train I want to call that train of tears, and a lot anger and frustration
When the children got to their destination, they were deloused, had their hair cut short or if they were boys, cut off completely. They were then assigned clothing...clothing with numbers on the back.
Do these scenes seem eerily familiar to you? That's right, almost a hundred years later, the Nazi's would use the same tactics with an ethnic group they hated.
The children's lives became regimented. They had to line up for everything, the toilets, baths, brushing teeth, going to class...everything. They were also not allowed to speak their own language. They were beaten when they did. Physical abuse was rampant as was sexual abuse.
One survivor from the Alberni school remembers:
“I was taken out night after night after night. And that went on until I was about twelve years old. And it was several of the male supervisors plus a female,” she said. “It was in the dorm; it was in their room; in was in the carport; it was in his car; it was in the gym; the back of the crummy that took us on road trips; the public school; the change room.”
There’s been 45 successful prosecutions of physical and sexual abuse at the schools.
Some of the children ran away, some were caught, but not all, and the remaining children in the dorm were physically punished for the runaways. One child, Larry Beardy, recalls how his whole dorm rebelled after everybody being strapped as punishment for a child who'd run away. They became violent and trashed the dorm. Talk of suicide became frequent.
I will end Part One here and continue with Part Two tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some basic numbers:
- A look at the numbers:
The 1840s – Church-run schools are established for aboriginal children.
1883 – The year the federal government establishes three large residential schools in Western Canada to “kill the Indian in the child.”
1920 – The year the Indian Act is amended to make it compulsory for status Indian children between seven and 15 to attend residential school.
70 – The number of residential schools operating by the 1930s.
130 – The total number of residential schools that received support from the federal government at the program’s peak.
60 per cent – The proportion of residential schools run by the Catholic church.
1996 – The year the last residential school closes outside Regina.
At least 6,000 – The number of children who died in Canada’s residential schools. Provinces are still handing over death certificates for aboriginal children from the residential school era.
60 per cent – The mortality rate reached at some residential schools, according to Truth and Reconciliation chairman Justice Murray Sinclair.
$1.9 billion – The federal government’s compensation package offered to former residential school students.
There is so much more to this story, that I will have to break it into parts. This is part one: the beginning. I hope to be able to get out a new part every day.